Relational contracts have been shown to mitigate moral hazard in labor and credit markets. A central assumption in most theoretical and experimental studies is that, upon misbehaving, agents can be excluded from their current source of income and have to resort to less attractive outside...

This paper investigates to what extent risk management and corporate governance mitigate the involvement of banks in credit boom and bust cycles. Using a unique, handcollected dataset on 156 banks from Central and Eastern Europe during 2005-2012, we assess whether banks with stronger risk...

We use a novel, representative survey to document the level of financial literacy among Swiss households and to examine how financial literacy is related to household investment and borrowing. We find that half of the respondents were able to answer three questions on basic financial concepts...

We exploit variation in consumer price inflation across 71 Russian regions to examine the relationship between the perceived stability of the local currency and financial dollarization. Our results show that regions with higher inflation experience an increase in the dollarization of household...

In Eastern Europe a substantial share of bank deposits are denominated in foreign currency. Deposit euroization poses key challenges for monetary policy and financial sector supervision. On the one hand, it limits the effectiveness of monetary policy interventions. On the other hand, it...

In small business lending the four-eyes principle leads loan officers to propose inflated credit ratings for their clients. Inflated ratings are, however, anticipated and corrected by the credit officers responsible for approving credit assessments. More experienced loan officers inflate those...

We study retail deposit withdrawals from European commercial banks which incurred investment losses in the wake of the U.S. subprime crisis. We document a strong propensity of households to withdraw deposits from distressed banks, especially when a bank receives a public bailout. However, the...

We examine the closeness of relationships between households and their mortgage lenders using survey data which provide information on the duration, geographical proximity and scope of all bank relationships of a representative sample of households. Our analysis is based on a sample of 470...

We examine how the expansion of the branch network of a microfinance bank between 2006 and 2010 in South-East Europe has affected the use of bank accounts by households in the region. Our analysis is based on survey data reporting the use of bank accounts, socioeconomic characteristics and...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to examine under which circumstances a depositor-run at one bank may lead to a depositor-run at another bank. We implement two-person coordination games which capture the essence of the Diamond-Dybvig (1983) bank-run model. Subjects in the roles of followers...